Trade Finance Operations Manager

About AIR8

An LFX digital venture, Air8 is building an insight-based technology platform that capitalizes on Li & Fung’s ecosystem with around 120 years of supply chain experience, connecting suppliers, buyers, and funders in over 50 markets. Air8’s goal is to combine supply chain insights with financing expertise and digital technologies to channel capital to vendors. Air8’s vision is to promote sustainable financing while bridging the supply chain working capital gap.

See https://air8.io/

LFX is a Fung Group company, which focuses on being an incubation, investment, and operating platform providing digital solutions and digitally enabled services across the end-to-end consumer goods supply chain.

See https://lfxdigital.com/

Job Description

We are looking for a Trade Finance Operations Manager to join our team and serve as a key deputy to the Operations Lead. You will support the management and continuous improvement of end-to-end trade finance, payments, factoring, and credit insurance operations, while taking hands-on ownership of daily delivery, team and outsourced-provider oversight, risk and exception monitoring, reconciliations, and management reporting.

The role offers the opportunity to help build smarter, scalable operations through process optimisation, stronger controls, and the use of technology, automation, and AI-enabled solutions.

Key Responsibilities

• Supports the Operations Lead, overseeing daily priorities, team capacity, deadlines, controls and business continuity.
• Provide hands-on supervision, review and backup across in-house and outsourced operations teams, ensuring work is accurate, timely and completed in line with SOPs and SLAs.
• Manage end-to-end trade finance operations, including client setup, KYC coordination, financing requests, document review, disbursement, monitoring, repayment, settlement and reconciliation.
• Review complex or higher-risk transactions, ensuring required approvals, conditions and supporting documents are in place before processing.
• Oversee payment operations with banks, PSPs and other partners, including payment preparation, authorisation, release, receipt allocation, settlement and reconciliation.
• Investigate and resolve payment, settlement and reconciliation exceptions, including rejected, delayed, returned, duplicated, unmatched or incorrect payments.
• Manage operational processing for refactoring and external funding arrangements, including transaction submissions, funder requirements, funding confirmations, repayments and reconciliations.
• Oversee credit insurance applications and ongoing monitoring, coordinating with internal stakeholders, insurers and brokers to manage approvals, conditions, coverage issues and claim documentation.
• Lead and manage operations team members, including work allocation, performance monitoring, quality reviews, training and SLA management.
• Monitor transaction ageing, outstanding documents, repayments, payment exceptions, unreconciled items and SLA breaches; ensure issues have clear owners and timely resolution.
• Identify, escalate and help mitigate operational, documentation, payment, credit, insurance and settlement risks, including recurring errors and control gaps.
• Drive the adoption of approved AI and technology solutions to improve efficiency, scalability and turnaround time while maintaining appropriate human review and control checkpoints.
• Partner with Technology, Data, Credit, Risk, Compliance, Finance, Business and external stakeholders on process improvements, UAT, implementation and issue resolution.
• Prepare management dashboards and reports covering operational volumes, service levels, backlog, ageing, payment and reconciliation exceptions, refactoring and credit insurance activity.
• Maintain SOPs, control checklists, escalation procedures and complete operational records for management, audit and regulatory purposes.

Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Business Administration, Finance, Accounting or a relevant discipline.
• Minimum 6 to 8 years+ of operations experience, preferably covering trade finance, supply chain finance, payments, banking or financial services.
• Practical experience in payment processing, settlement and reconciliation; exposure to external funding or credit insurance is preferred.
• Experience supervising internal or outsourced teams and managing SLA-based delivery.
• Strong understanding of operational risk, maker-checker controls, exception management and escalation.
• Experience in process automation, AI-enabled operations, system implementation or UAT is preferred.
• Strong analytical, communication and stakeholder-management skills.
• Good spoken and written English and Mandarin; Cantonese is an advantage.